Yes! Sci was on the radio just recently, on the CBC show Spark
, talking about pseudonyms, and why I have one, and why I think they are important. Interesting chance to hear both sides of the debate. So if you'd like to hear Sci's dulcet tones (and they are so very dulcet), head on over and give it a listen!

Hermitage has done it again, and by "it", I mean her fantastic carnival about women in academia, now with 100% fewer babies! Many women in academia find that "women in academia" seminars and sessions end up dominated by questions of family balance, and while that's obviously extremely important, there are lots of questions out there about being a women in academia that don't involve having children. And now Hermie has gathered some of those questions, and has asked some bigger, badder female bloggers to weigh in. She's got all the links at her place and the answers are ALWAYS well worth a read. Go check it out!

Yeah, I know it was over a week ago, but when you've got 10 collaborators, and none of them has spare time, you can understand why it took a while. And now. Here we are.

At Science Online 2011 this past weekend, Joanne Manaster, Maryn McKenna, Vivienne Raper, Eric Michael Johnson, Brian Mossop, Carin Bondar, Melody Dye, Christie Wilcox, Ed Yong and I led a session on "how to explain science in blog posts". The topic sounds prosaic, but it's more complicated than it sounds. It's often hard for a hardcore scientist to really get down to a lay level and its equally hard to keep it entertaining without becoming a fact-spewing machine. We wanted people to get tips out of the session on how to write for a lay audience, and how to tell whether it was working.

But we all acknowledged that we don't know it all about explaining science, and so we decided to break the session up into five discussion groups, where people could voice their ideas on specific topics. We then got together and shared what we'd learned, and had everyone from all of the five discussion groups weigh in. I feel like I personally got a lot out of it that will change the way I blog in the future (when I have to implement some of it!).

And of course we pooled out notes. So below is the basic transcript of what went down, with a couple of comments added in from me. And for those who were there: did we miss anything? Fill me in in the comments!!

First off, thanks SO much to everyone who responded to my survey!!! I really appreciate it! I ended up with over 200 responses, but because I'm cheap and don't want to pay outrageous prices for Survey Monkey, I only have access to the first 100. 🙁 But still, we got DATA. And what it says is very interesting, I think.

I want to give major props to Jason for his amazing work as this year's editor!! Having been editor last year, I can tell you it involves an organized brain, many sleepless nights, and some seriously hard decisions. I think he came up with a great list, and I'm so proud to be in it!!

Sci's been wondering about this. People who have blogs, who reads you? How do you know? I know from sitemeter where my links are coming in from, but I really don't have a good idea of WHO these people ARE.